MOZ – An advanced SEO tool or just another “same-same but different” SEO software?

I was using probably all possible SEO tools on the market. Nothing is same and in the same time it’s same-same; but still, they all have strong and weak sides. Your choice of what SEO software to use should be made based on your needs, and you need to be as accurate as possible. MOZ, Ahrefs, SEMRush, SEOProfiler, Raven Tools, Web Ceo, a new startup Positionly and others – they are all doing an excellent job. But are they delivering your expectations and prove SEO ROI to you?

Let’s talk about MOZ today – as this SEO analytics tool is known to be a number one, looking from the marketing perspective.

MOZ has been an authority in SEO for a while. All SEO professionals are referring to its keyword rankings, domain authority rank and see MOZ as an influencer number one.

I agree. The product is beautiful so far. Great interface and easy to use functions make MOZ Pro one of the best in class. Read it correctly: “one of the”, not “the only one”.

“Customers don’t buy products, they buy user experience”.

Let’s talk about my experience with MOZ. In Rainmaker Labs, a Singapore-based technology company, where I’m in charge of all marketing activities, it’s important for us to keep track of what our position on Google is. We track lots of keywords, from the broad ones to the very specific industry focused terms. We also measure content marketing and align it with a Search Engine Optimization strategy.

Benefits of using MOZ.

You can find lots of information on Google, on MOZ sponsored content and from SEO bloggers about benefits of using MOZ for measuring SEO campaigns, let’s not talk about obvious things.

Don’t take this article as critics of one particular SEO software, but as a personal experience story with MOZ Pro SEO tool. More reviews on other SEM / SEO management & analytics providers are coming soon.

MOZ: 50 and enough. Are you serious?

Keywords positioning is not precise, and rankings are limited to #50 only. If you plan on going with highly competitive keywords and measure keyword success, sorry to tell you – you will get disappointed.

I know, you may say that having a website ranked by a keyword which is on position #65 is not important, but I will tell you – it is. Measuring any increase in keyword rankings or decrease can give you a clear picture of what you are doing right, and what you are doing wrong in search engine optimization activities and content marketing strategy. So if your website was ranking in Google by a request “chocolate smoothie” as #185, and you started to work on it to bring keywords to the first page, you will not see any keywords performance reports until it will jump to a position #49 at least.

Fail in a real-time keyword ranking analytics.

You simply can not see a real-time keyword rankings, whatever any “expert” will tell you. All that you get is a weekly or monthly report only, which is showing you past week SEO performance. It works in a case if you are using a tool only for monitoring, but not struggling for keyword rankings and not implementing any inbound marketing techniques to your website. Great tool for reports in case you are an agency or freelancer doing SEO, but not if you care about what you do. For now, that’s it.

Screenshot was taken on January 20th, 2016.

Is it worth paying for MOZ?

Well, I use their services as find them useful in some way… But again, beautifully designed user interface is not what I expect from SEO tool. It is an excellent benefit for MOZ I can’t argue. Their UI is simple and beautiful; their report graphs look sweet… But will it help to do SEO for my websites?

Stats look beautiful. Colors, layout… But so outdated…

Forgot to mention, MOZ is probably the only one SEO company around, who has advanced SEO community on their side. With their YouMoz, that enables every subscriber to become an author and contributor to MOZ blog, they done an excellent job in influencers engagement. So if you are looking for a place to learn and contribute, go for it.

As for me, I’m moving out from MOZ, as I see it useful only for monitoring and sustaining SEO campaigns that already passed a stage of SEO battlefield. This software can not provide me with what I need – real time or, at least, daily rankings information. Not talking about backlinks here, as it’s not a core MOZ capability, but some other tools already covered that part, and they do it well. Time for MOZ 2.0, folks!